Brazil 2026: Finding the untapped corners in SERPs

The first piece in this two-parter looked at the shape of the Brazilian iGaming SERPs, dominated by national news media, with operators leaning heavily on branded search and a substantial cohort of users actively trying to leave the ecosystem or sense-check it after the fact.

Thanks again to Lorena Vieira (Big Daddy Gaming), Sei Kato (ICS-digital) and Jaime Moscote (Testa) for sharing their insights for this series.

The picture isn't necessarily bad news for affiliates – it just means that finite time and budget need to be deployed carefully. There are some clear gaps worth targeting, and a few areas where affiliates can realistically outperform both operators and media on quality.

Starting with one that's still surprisingly underexploited: 

AI visibility: The calm before the storm?

This wouldn't be an article about iGaming SEO without a mention of AI, so here's one slightly contrarian observation –

Across roughly 1,500 commercial igaming keywords, only a very small percentage are currently triggering AI Overviews in Brazilian SERPs from what we can see.

Featured snippets and People Also Ask are also relatively limited. For now, Brazil is still largely a "ten blue links" market. While that probably won't last, it does give some scope to carve out visibility and traffic in the short term.

In the longer term, getting ready for AI Overviews and AI search will be increasingly relevant. For now, affiliates and smaller betting brands could invest in things like schema markup and high-quality link building, so they’re positioned well when the time comes. 

PT-BR SERPs tend to follow English-language behaviour with a bit of a time delay. The sites that build this properly now are likely to have an early advantage.

Making a habit of structuring content for AI citation as well as ranking. Clear definitions at the start, named entities and properly structured answers will do no harm whatsoever, while having a potentially big upside further down the line.

This feels like a safe recommendation, especially if coupled with off-site SEO, digital PR, link acquisition and off-domain mentions more generally.

When AI systems decide what to surface, they tend to favour sources that are consistently referenced elsewhere, so starting the process – like applying the first coat of paint on a wall – is highly recommended given the current state of the market.

Influencer, creator and paid social: It pays to be measured

The previous Argentina piece touched on the scale and vibrancy of the LatAm creator economy. In Brazil, both factors are even more pronounced, and it's closely tied to how people consume sports and betting content.

The instinct in a regulated market is often to chase reach, while in practice, mid-tier creators (50k - 500k followers) with engaged audiences can deliver more meaningful results. Football podcasters, regional sports YouTubers and tipsters with active communities are often more effective than larger, less focused accounts – and there's plenty of them.

This type of social footprint increasingly feeds back into search as well. Branded queries, YouTube visibility and entity signals for future AI visibility all benefit from sustained and authentic creator exposure.

For affiliates, the more interesting play is often in finding authentic, unpaid partnerships or working on the editorial side – contributing data, insight or commentary to smaller publishers so that they become part of the editorial/social ecosystem rather than another advertiser within it.

Content strategy: Authentic content, mapped to intent

If there's one consistent pattern in Brazilian SERPs, it's that scaled, templated content is being filtered out more quickly than in many other LatAm markets.

Combined with the search trends around vocally unhappy customers and the imperative to build trust, affiliates likely need to avoid the temptation of 'landfill content' created at scale with AI, especially if they can't understand the language.

What does work is original, experience-led content. Reviews based on actual usage – time on site, withdrawal experience, support response times, mobile UX – tend to hold up better and provide continuous value, though focusing on personality and entertainment-factor is a possible route too – especially if looking at multichannel content across streaming, video, audio and the like. These are areas where affiliates can still outperform both operators and media on quality and sheer use value/engagement.

As with other markets, comparison content with a point of view also performs better than generic lists. "Best for live football betting" with reasoning is more useful than a flat "top 10" grid, but beyond the content itself, it is important to have discipline in technical SEO and UX more generally.

Sites that cluster content properly – payments, reviews, sports, trust – tend to hold up better than flatter affiliate builds, particularly when that content is properly interlinked and maintained. Bettors, search engines and AI platforms all want to assess whether the site 'feels' live and trustworthy and provides accurate, locally focused information.

In this regard, there's a gap most affiliates are still leaving on the table – sports-utility content.

Queries like "estatísticas de brasileirão série a" (Brazilian league statistics), "copa do mundo de clubes classificação" (Club World Cup standings) and broader fixture or stats queries carry significant volume. In some cases, fairly weak/lacklustre operator blogs are picking this up while affiliates aren't competing at all.

Owning that layer is one of the cleaner ways to build topical authority that feeds into commercial rankings later on, especially if affiliates can 'own the customer' with newsletter signups, social follows and non-obnoxious retargeting.

iGaming winners and losers in Brazil  – next 12 months

It is probably the operators, particularly larger groups with thick budgets but limited local depth, who have the most to lose.

Affiliates tend to be forced into sharper decisions by constraints. Outside of Brazil, the most dynamic affiliates have been battle-hardened by a tough few years and successive broad core Google updates.

Brazilian news media have established trust and distribution, so they are fairly entrenched. But operators, especially new entrants, often try to do too much at once – sponsorships, influencers, paid media and content – without the local insight and agility to respond to risks and opportunities as they would hope.

Moscote points to two recent partnerships that arguably illustrate the range of outcomes:

"VaideBet and Corinthians is the cautionary tale everyone in the industry knows. A record BRL 370 million deal was reportedly cancelled within months over corruption allegations, dragging the sector's reputation down with it.

Betano's decision to sponsor the Brazilian Serie A league rather than a single club was genuinely smart – national visibility, no tribal risk, structural credibility. The market seems to have sobered up since, with reportedly around 28% fewer front-of-shirt deals in 2026 than in 2025."

In a market this competitive, doing a few things well tends to outperform doing everything halfway.

The strategy lies in being opportunity-focused, not fighting unwinnable battles and carving out a niche as a distinctive brand with a reason to exist, with content that is legitimately valuable and interesting while also structured for search. 

Affiliates can find an edge in: 

• Mid- and long-tail commercial queries that haven't been properly developed
• Payments, withdrawal and trust content that operators won't publish and media won't test
• Responsible gambling content that is still underserved
• Sports-utility content that builds authority over time
• AI visibility groundwork before SERPs shift further

… all supported (of course) by off-site SEO and qualitative link acquisition.

Brazil isn't the open opportunity it was a couple of years ago. It's a market with defined traits and trends, even as it continues to develop.

The Brazilian online betting landscape, as it stands, seems to reward competence, customer focus and integrated marketing – and there are numerous ways that affiliates can intelligently earn their own piece of the pie.